Par Kumaraswami

Writing between the margins: new perspectives on two women writers from Latin America

These two monographs continue and build on the trajectory of sustained critical attention to Latin American women writers over the past twenty years (Araújo 1989, Castillo 1992, Brooksbank Jones and Davies 1996, Kaminsky 1999), a journey underpinned by a necessary politics of visibilisation by feminist writers and scholars, which has often been guided by its own ethical imperatives of promotion and interpretation. In more recent years, and in line with changes in national and transnational publishing structures affecting Hispanic letters, writing by Latin American women has been subject to the damaging commercial influence of global publishers, leading to often narrow, allegedly market-driven and simplistic or ‘popular’ articulations of how women from Latin America might write. These two concerns, located at either end of the spectrum of readership but both appropriated in the service of overly restrictive categories of women’s writing from Latin America, are addressed equally effectively, although in markedly different ways, by the two volumes reviewed here. The works of the Argentinian writer and critic Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972) and of the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit (1949), writers whose works consciously and selfreflexively resist easy reception and classification, are unlikely to be re-edited and republished by the transnational publishing houses that have created and sustained a marketplace for the category of ‘women’s writing’. Both writers are known for their literariness, their strategies designed to decentre, distance and disorient the reader, and both are examined with care and sensitivity in these volumes, with great concern for established perspectives, contexts of production and reception, for questions of intertextuality and the interplay of theory and practice. Importantly, both are explored without reducing all their textual production to gendered interpretations. Mary Green’s monograph on Eltit takes a chronological approach to the various articulations of motherhood and sexuality in Eltit’s first six novels, whose publication in first edition spanned the periods of the dictatorship and transition in Chile: Lumpérica (1983); Por la patria (1986); El cuarto mundo (1988); Vaca sagrada (1991); Los vigilantes (1994); and Los trabajadores de la muerte (1998). Through close textual analysis, framed by extensive contextual information which brings to life the radical political elements of a writer whose work is often considered hermetic and inaccessible, Green presents an extremely convincing examination of how Eltit